This disclosure generally relates to online systems, and more specifically to predictions of demographics of a user, e.g., age, gender, and interests, based on image data associated with the user from one or more online systems.
Content providers produce content that is targeted to certain audiences within online systems. Users interact with content received from the online systems. With the advent of online systems such as social networking systems, content providers have increasingly relied on the online systems to create effective sponsored content within the online systems to greatly increase engagement among users of the online systems. With the increasing number of available online systems, users may be individually registered across a wide number of online systems. Each time the user registers with an online system, the user has a new user profile that may be unique to that particular online system. Users may use each online system for different purposes. For example, a user may primarily utilize a first online system as a social online network, and utilize a second online system for visual storytelling or a professional online network. Thus, users may provide different information (e.g., different profile photos) in their user profile on each respective online system.
Online systems often utilize the information provided by a user in the user profile for a variety of purposes. For example, online systems may desire to deliver content items that are tailored for a user based on the user's interests and/or characteristics that are listed in the user's profile. However, given that a user may only choose to provide a portion of his/her characteristics or interests to any one online system, each online system may not have a full understanding of the user. This leads to inefficiencies, e.g., failure to have a comprehensive understanding of a user's interests, especially in the context of content delivery where the lack of a comprehensive profile of the user may lead to the delivery of content that is poorly tailored to the user.